Headline: "The Wizard of Oz is for real".
 Chinese Engineers come up with undeniable proof.

8 March, 2012 Have migrated to a new server, which should help with maintaining full uptime for the webcounters.

25 August, 2011 The server has been under attack from a hacker in Beijing, China for the past week,
leading to outages, lockups and other issues. The damage has hopefully been repaired and things should be
working again.

30 April, 2008 Been awhile since I updated. It seems that some spammers have added my email address
as a 'sender' to their bots, so I'm being inundated with delivery-failure messages. So don't be surprised
if I deactivate it and set up a contact form here instead.

25 February, 2007 A new feature has been added to the webcounters. More details here.

25 January, 2005 Finally over the cold I picked up at Further Confusion, and will try to get photos
and video clips up from that soon! Also a notice to counter users: connections from the 165.21.154.x network
do not appear to be transmitting cookies to the counter server! This may be a side-effect of rerouting done after the loss of a communications
satellite, or just due to a router doing heavy filtering on packets. This primarily affects counter owners in that area
(Singapore/Southeast Asia) who have 'Ignore My Visits' cookies set but are having their visits counted anyway. I'm still
monitoring this to see if other networks are having the same issue, but there really isn't much I can do at this end of
things. Repeat visits from cookie-less connections are based on tracking the IP address, so the 'drift' in the counter
from people visiting their own pages should be minimal until the network is working properly again. Other cookie-based
sites do not seem to be having this problem however, which makes it even more frustrating.

21 November, 2004 Altered the guestbook to disallow JavaScript in messages, since
some joker put code in to send people to a pr0n site. I intend to replace the guestbook
with something more up-to-date eventually, I've just been lazy.

20 August, 2003 I hate email viruses and spam. Who doesn't? But what I really hate
is getting 'failed delivery' emails from them because they were sent with my email address
forged as the sender. Why? Because it's on my website. Even my mother started getting these
a few weeks after she started using Ebay.

It was always just a nuisance, back when I was getting two or three of these replies a week.
But today I got over 200 of them! Not just me, but people I work with who also
have contact addresses on their websites. Some of them were concerned enough about it that
they shut down their mail servers in case they had been hacked.

So, in case anyone reading this has ever gotten a spam email or virus with a sender address of
'boingdragon.com', it was not sent out from here! And if people were a little smarter
about dealing with file attachments, these viruses wouldn't be getting loose in the first place.
That's the really frustrating part of it: my or anyone else's email domain could be blocked
because of a complete stranger's moment of carelessness.

10 August, 2003 We had a surprise visit today from a deer - in our back yard! The video
has been added to the gallery, here

27 July, 2003 Now that I've got a broadband connection, I'm starting to upload video
clips again! The raccoon videos are back up here
again, and I'll be adding some new ones along with convention videos in the coming weeks.

16 June, 2003 Added some new photos to the Collectibles and Wildlife photo galleries!
Also, it looks like I'll be eligible for cable-modem service by the end of July, so I'll finally
be able to upload all of the video clips I've been accumulating.

12 May, 2003 Yet another change to the left-side navbar. While the all-CSS solution was
really neat and elegant, it just didn't degrade nicely to older browsers. As a compromise, the
new rollover buttons load faster than the old ones, and still give me a relatively simple way
to add new ones over time.

9 May, 2003 I took down the 'Learn the Secrets of Llap-Goch' page. Someone pointed out
to me that it was actually from Monty Python, and a little digging showed it was from the book,
The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok. It's out of print, but some copies are still available
on Amazon.

Here's a link to an online transcript of it, along with a picture of the original page from the
book.

I posted the page back in 1995 from a printout I'd gotten in 1987 or so, without any credits. I thought
it was funny enough to put up, never knowing its source. And promptly forgot about it, so I never tried
searching on it once things like Yahoo! and AltaVista came into being, much less Google.

So take heed of the lesson: always check your sources!

5 May, 2003 New nav-button added for logging into your webcounter manager.
This goes along with the new log-in challenge for the counter manager.

23 April, 2003 New navigation! The old Javascript rollover buttons in the
sidebar have been replaced with Cascading Style Sheet rollovers - now 100% Javascript
Free! It took awhile to get them to work in both IE and Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla and Netscape).
I can't check them with old old browsers though, so if you just see a bunch of yellow
links with no button backgrounds, drop me a line and let me know what browser you're using!

In other news, the new gallery is online now, although I'm still working on adding the video
clips, especially all of the raccoon videos. When they're back, they should available in higher
resolutions for download as well.

I'm now on LiveJournal! Don't expect a lot of output from me though, at least not yet.
My primary goal for my LJ right now is to fix the stylesheet and layout for it. Until I
put up the navigation link for it, you can see it by going here.

13 April, 2003 New counters added! I've added two different howling-wolf
counters. Check them out in the Counter Types section.

Other updates coming: A new gallery! You can preview it here, and it will
replace the old galleries as soon as I finish adding the video-clips to it.

10 February, 2003 I've added some tweaks to the Counter Management System,
and put up the photos from Further Confusion 2003 here until
I finish processing the video and set up a dedicated gallery.

31 January, 2003 It'd been awhile since my last update, mainly because I've been busy with contract work
and managing a friend's server. I'm back from Further Confusion 2003 with a few hundred photos and 7 hours of video
to edit, so it might be a little while before I post it all (I'm going to program a new gallery system first). Keep
an eye out for a new reporting feature in the webcounters too! Now I just have to get over the flu.

2 September, 2002 - New Server!
Yes, I've changed servers once more , and am in the process of updating my website again. The webcounters have been moved to Port 81, with redirects for people that haven't updated their urls yet.
The old IP address will be gone by the middle of September, so be sure to update your counters to use "boingdragon.com:81" instead of "66.33.1.16 0". Account urls are now "boingdragon.com/account/" instead of the old "cgi. boingdragon.com/cgi-bin/account/" ones.

I'll be offering webhost ing services in the near future, and other goodies, so stay tuned!

Email was down for awhile, but is working now!

21 August, 2002
DNS is pretty stable now through Verisign, so I sent out 1,787 emails to counter users
who were using the IP address for their counters to change to the domain instead, to
make things smoother when I eventually move the counters to a new server. Amazingly, only
384 of their email addresses were bad! A mere 21%. Now I just need to search all of their
websites to see if they have updated contact info.

22 July, 2002
DNS went down on Saturday or Friday due to a spam-tracking alert. I've switched
nameserver hosts, and hopefully locked down my mailserver so that it can't be
used as a relay anymore. Someone decided that cgi.boingdragon.com would be good
to send their spam through. }:P Hopefully this will be resolved within a few
days. I've also started to put up some new baby raccoon images in the Critters Gallery.

April 28, 2002 Went to the Dream Machines show in Half Moon Bay today, and took close to 200 pictures of cars and planes!
I haven't set up a gallery page for them yet, but you can see the raw images here.

April 24, 2002 New gallery added! The Panorama Gallery
is where I'll be putting up panoramic pictures and Quicktime VR 360-degree views taken with my
digital camera. It's starting off with three local views of the area I live in.

March 7, 2002 Well, it doesn't look like the old server will be
coming back online, so I've restarted the Guestbook here.

March 3, 2002 Due to problems with the main website server, I've
moved things over to my counter server. Until the old one comes back up,
the guestbook entries will be broken.

January 31, 2002 Further Confusion photo gallery is up! Click here to get to it,
and the video clips of the animals have been added to the Critter Cam on the main Gallery page as well.

January 25, 2002 Further Confusion

I'm off to Further Confusion in San Mateo! Whoo!

November 6, 2001 Videos!

I've added a bunch of RealVideo clips of my raccoons! You can click
here to launch the viewer
or go to the top of the Gallery page.

October 30, 2001 Bye-Bye Banners, Hello Deer

I let 'em run for 2 months, and they mostly just generated spam mail for me, so the banner ads
are no more! Maybe I didn't give them enough time, but I really just disliked the idea of
having them there anyway.

Also new - pictures of a buck deer visiting my back yard, and giving a really good idea of just
how effective his camoflage can be! You can barely see his antlers, but there were pretty decent.
Also a new picture of a new litter of raccoons - or most of it, actually. Only three
of the babies are seen, because I haven't been able to get any good shots of all five together.

Happy Halloween, too!

October 19, 2001 More New Pics!

A fresh batch of baby raccoon pictures has been added to the Gallery.

October 8, 2001 Guestbook fix.

Well, it wasn't the Y2K bug, but the universal time clock (measuring seconds since Jan 1, 1970)
finally rolled over the 1-million second mark, which caused some glitches in the guestbook
due to the way Perl sorts strings. Now, the correct dates show up on the correct pages. }:)

August 26, 2001 New Gallery Pics!

I've added a new section to my Gallery called 'Critters', with snapshots (and eventually
some video clips) of the local wildlife that likes to visit my backyard. It also features
my 'Raccoon Activity Center', a 3-D maze made of closet-organizer panels. Also, sometime last
night the new counter rolled over the 100,000 hit mark! }:)

August 3, 2001 I held out for as long as I could ...

... but finally I had to put up some ad banners, as my employment prospects out
here haven't improved, and I need something to help cover the cost of the counter
server. To compensate, I'll try adding more features to the site like games and
puzzles.

July 11, 2001 Ooops!

While changing all instances of my old email address, I accidentally replaced the
guestbook database with an older copy! So, the entries for most of June and the
beginning of July got lost. D'oh!

March 5, 2001 New Site Design!

And it only took me two years! That's what comes of getting a real job. Of course,
now that I'm laid-off I might as well update things.

The counters are back! New! Mostly Improved! Not all of the ones I had before, but
these are way more accurate and hopefully easier to set up and manage. I'll try to
keep adding new (and old) ones as I get the chance.

Also new is the Downloads area, where I'll be putting up source code for the image
generating part of the webcounters, so that people can host them on their own servers
and not eat up all of my bandwidth (plus, they'll be faster loading then). I'll probably
put up the sources for some of the little programs and scripts I use for the website
as well.

The Jukebox, Headlines Pop-Up and any other toys will go into the Goodies area, and I'll
be doing a major rebuild of my Gallery, with lots of new pictures and even some panoramic
Quicktime VR stuff eventually.